The ability to perform digital investigations and incident response is a critical skill for many occupations. Unfortunately, digital investigators frequently lack the training or experience to take advantage of the volatile artifacts found in physical memory. Volatile memory contains valuable information about the runtime state of the system, provides the ability to link artifacts from traditional forensic analysis (network, file system, registry), and provides the ability to ascertain investigative leads that have been unbeknownst to most analysts. Malicious adversaries have been leveraging this knowledge disparity to undermine many aspects of the digital investigation process with such things as anti-forensics techniques, memory resident malware, kernel rootkits, and encryption (file systems, network traffic, etc.). The only way to turn-the-tables and defeat a creative digital human adversary is through talented analysts.
2024-05-01